They’ll be dancing in the streets of Glasgow and Cardiff tonight after England’s “last minute collapse to France”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/euro_2004/3787491.stm at Euro 2004. Not fatal, but very deflating to English morale. It is the worst way to lose a game, to think you’re home and dry and then to concede twice in extra time and I’m feeling almost as let down now as I did when Man U beat Bayern Munich in the European Cup (it isn’t quite that bad). Still, an entertaining start to the tournament with a “splendid Greek performance”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/euro_2004/3787343.stm against Portugal yesterday, and I rather fancy the Danes to shock Italy tomorrow.
Eugene Volokh says he’s “not going to comment”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_06_07.shtml#1087053377 about the “torture memo”:http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/06/07/0988582, which has already been discussed in detail by “a number”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/06/apologia_pro_tormento_analyzing_the_first_56_pages_of_the_walker_working_group_report_aka_the_torture_memo.html of “well-known”:http://balkin.blogspot.com/2004_06_06_balkin_archive.html#108678914722707979 law bloggers. Eugene says he doesn’t want to talk about it partly because it’s outside his main areas of legal expertise, but mostly because he finds the topic
bq. not just difficult but also sickening. Torture is disgusting. … Does the need to save people’s lives justify torturing suspects? How many lives? Would it take hundreds of thousands (as in the hidden nuclear bomb scenario)? Thousands? Dozens? A couple? I don’t know the answers, and while I have no doubt about the importance of the questions, I don’t enjoy thinking about them. The whole topic is sad and horrible, whatever the right answer is. … It’s not a rational reaction; it’s a visceral one. I’m not proud of my squeamishness, but there it is. I know that just because something is sickening doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. Sometimes people need to do disgusting things to avoid greater harms. … But if I had a choice in how to invest my scarce time, I’d rather not invest it here.
I was surprised to read this, for two reasons.
I know I’m way late with this, but I must have missed it on my travels last month. The “Gadflyer”:http://www.gadflyer.com brings me “the story”:http://gadflyer.com/articles/?ArticleID=131 that the Rev Sun Myung Moon had himself “crowned Emporer of the United States”:http://www.gorenfeld.net/blog/2004/05/im-and-i-approve-this-messiah.html and “declared the Messiah”:http://www.jonsullivan.com/DiaryDetail.php?pg=1337&mat=ddef at a ceremony in the “Dirksen Senate Office Building”:http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/32914 in “the presence”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004_03_28_atrios_archive.html#108067610445417648 and with the “enthusiastic participation”:http://www.gorenfeld.net/blog/2004/05/im-and-i-approve-this-messiah.html of a bipartisan contingent of Members of Congress. No, really. Did this even make the newspapers?